A wonderfully dark and comical look at life in girls boarding schools, family alienation, class, money and control. it’s a modern Mallory towers but much more adult inclined. It’s a wonderful read, never light, but a good look at our obsession with appearance and celebrity, weight etc. It’s at times scary (but that’s a scary look at reality and how we are) and dark, but always thought provoking and well written. Recommended

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

When Natasha arrives from Russia at her new boarding school in rural England, she struggles to adapt. Not only the foreign language, but the special language all these year-11 girls from superrich families use. Yet, not only the words, but also the manners are quite unique and the one thing that they are obsessed with is how to lose weight. It is not just to get rid of some rests of baby fat or being in a better shape, the most important thing is being thinner than the others since the headmaster treats those girls differently. But then, their weight-loss competition goes totally wrong and one of the girls dies. Reaction of the school management: let’s not get any information outside and set up an anti-anorexia plan which only gives the girls even more ideas of what to do...

“Oligarchy” starts like some typical boarding school novel. 15-year-olds who do not have any serious worries, who try out the most absurd diets they can find, and modern-day obsession with pictures on the internet. Yet, it does not stop there, on the surface, of course, it is the world of adolescents we are presented with, teenagers who are reluctant to what their parents do and where the money comes from and who rebel against strict rules on their school. However, underneath, there are some much more fundamental questions addressed, first of all, how eating disorders are fired by what we are presented with every day. Secondly, the girls are rich, but most of them actually do not really have somebody to turn to, their parents are simply absent and even times of deepest distress does not seem to trigger any reaction from them.

Even though the novel is a bit stereotypical when it comes to the characters, I think the author did well in combining relevant topics in an enjoyable read. First and foremost, she has found the perfect tone with does neither ridicule the teenagers with their absurd ideas of how to diet and their supposedly secret cheating, nor does she take the serious consequences of their action too lightly. It is a novel that can educate, but fortunately, you do not feel like being educated.

This is one of those books that make you thanks for not being a teenager anymore.
It's dark, disturbing, a darkly humorous.
The tone is detached, sometimes chilling and the cast of characters is well written even if it's hard to say if they're simply shallow or suffering.
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who's got issues with food or is suffering from any eating disorder because it could strongly resonate and it surely wouldn't be an enjoyable read.
It's the first novel I read by this author and won't surely be the last.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I have been a fan of Scarlett Thomas since reading her very first novel, so I was delighted to receive her latest, for review.

This is nothing like her previous novels, but a clever, darkly humorous, look at the lives of a group of girls at a private, girls boarding school. Our main character is Natasha (Tash) the daughter of a Russian oligarch, who is packed off, as though on a whim, to study in the UK. Tash is beautiful, rich and privileged, like the other girls in her dorm. Like them, she is also desperate to be thin, as are most of the school. Afternoon tea, we are informed, was stopped after literally nobody ever ate it…

Tash meets up with an Aunt Sonja, who she had never heard of before. Sonja is older, also rich and also obsessed with food – or, rather, with not eating it. Gradually, she attempts, in a slightly confused way, to impart some knowledge and advice to her young charge. She also helps her to understand the ways of her mysterious, distant father, who is a mystery to his young daughter.

Actually, Tash has enough mysteries to deal with. First of all, there is the disappearance of Tiffanie, after her visits to the Headmaster. Then Dr Morgan vanishes. With the girls vying with each other to gain ever thinner bodies, specialists are brought in to discuss eating disorders with the girls. Meanwhile, Tash needs to discover who she is and what is going on at the school.

This is a novel about self-discovery, of belonging, peer pressure, manipulation, competition and social media. What, ultimately, makes it work is not the sharp, biting writing, but the fact that you come to care about these characters. In the wrong hands, the reader might write off these precious, precocious young women – with their black credit cards, snobbish and judgemental views and bizarre diets. However, Thomas is aware that pain and confusion are there, regardless of wealth and privilege. A wonderful novel that I enjoyed every word of. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

Scarlett Thomas specialises in quirky novels with slightly eccentric characters. They are usually long, and often the ideas are stronger than the plotting.

Oligarchy is different, in that it is a short novel - but it still has quirky characters and fizzy ideas. Natasha is the daughter of a Russian oligarch who seems to have only recently faced up to his parental responsibilities. So he has arranged for Natasha to come to England to go to an all girls boarding school near Hitchin. It is not a major public school and most of the girls are from families that are rich enough to give them a sense of entitlement, but not rich enough to be independent. So Natasha, supported by her wealthy Aunt Sonja in London and a black Amex card, is popular despite her hefty thighs.

Because hefty thighs are not what Oligarchy is about. It is essentially a satire of eating disorders - the lengths girls will go to in avoiding calories, the exploitation of young girls, and the bizarre steps taken by the school to get the girls to eat sensibly. Oh, and some of the girls disappear. And so do some of the teachers. It doesn't sound like it should be funny, but it is. Australian readers may spot some of the tropes from Chris Lilley's "Ja'mie Private Schoolgirl".

The high points are the outrageous behaviour of the girls, showing off while trying to appear collegiate, manipulating teachers. The middle points are Natasha's relationship with Aunt Sonja - a bad and hedonistic aunt who seems to have no conscience about her wealth generated in various nefarious ways. The bits that interested me least were Natasha's relationships with a couple of likely lads - including the son of her father's lawyer - and the disappearances which seemed rather under-explored. It was like a little strand of detective novel in something that really wasn't a detective novel.

Oligarchy was a pleasantly quirky novel with moments of brilliance. I just wish a couple of the themes had been explored more - particularly the whole oligarchy thing - and maybe more compare and contrast to show what it was like for Natasha to be plucked from ordinary Russian society to her privileged lifestyle. Still a pretty good and quick read though - and definitely not a young adult novel despite the boarding school setting.

'Sometimes she also prays for peace, and joy, and to be thin. Sometimes she even prays for the villagers, that they might become thin too.'

The thing - one of many things - I like about Scarlett Thomas's books is that they always give something unexpected. There is no "just" to them. They are all recognisably hers, but they are also all very different and they all confound one's assumptions.

So Oligarchy is a book about a group of schoolgirls, with a mystery element, but little detection - and at the same time it's a book about the pressures modern society imposes on young women - and at the same time, a book about friendship and abuse. It's also funny, sad and truthful.

As I started the book - with Russian oligarch's daughter Natalya ('but at home they call her Natasha') coming to a scuzzy English boarding school in the Midlands - I thought it might take a fantastic turn. The village boys howl like dogs outside the school gates at night. This is not a metaphor, but it's not pursued (which boys? why?) There's also a distinctly gothic twist in the girls' mythology of the school, involving a drowning Princess, a Sultan and a diamond. The story hovers behind the action, inspiring various events and being embroidered in various ways but as with those howling boys there is no "official" explanation.

Later, with deaths occurring, and an interesting sounding detective (DI Amaryllis Archer, in her jeans and high-heeled boots) appearing on the scene, I wondered about the mystery element - but while it's there and is, eventually, resolved (kind of) that's not central either at least not in detail.

Central, rather, are the lives of the girls and the caustic, pressured expectations on them in modern society. Tash, arriving from Russia, the recently discovered daughter of an oligarch who has plucked her from obscurity and stored her away for safekeeping, is our way into the group, whose members deform almost before our eyes under the weight of those expectations. There is Bianca ('She doesn't tell anyone about the sadness and the failure and the light inside her that is a bright white colour but is never bright or white enough'). Tiffanie, who plans her funeral 'which will have a botanical theme' and who is 'too lazy, too French and frankly too fucking cool to learn English pronunciation' and whose usage of 'Ange' for English 'ing' becomes a meme among the girls. There is Becky 'with the bad hair', the would-be Head Girl.

Thomas's eye for character here is so sharp, getting right inside (Tash's Aunt Sonya 'looks like money rather than sex or love') and it's the way her ensemble of memorable, real people - most of them young women - reacts to the stresses on them that makes this book come alive and forms the gothic heart of the novel (with the oft-quoted story of Princess Augusta the topping, perhaps). There's an atmosphere of confinement, or abandonment, to this group in their strange school and of a breakdown of their sense of identity as they try to be - something. All manner of fake science, folk wisdom and wishful thinking swill around concerning what one should and should not eat, what one should be and not be. The the urge to thinness becomes almost a contagion in itself, with its own heroes and victims.

There is no restraint, no voice of reason, and a palpable sense of the girls being alone - this seems to be a singularly ill-run school where there is no help, typified by an episode where a vomiting bug has broken out and they are simply left alone, in a dormitory, to wait it out - but also very much exposed to the ill winds of social media, to the expectations of teaches, gym trainers and shifty DJs in provincial basement nightclubs. The paradoxes of teenage life - of innocence and experience ('at fifteen you have to practice everything you plan to do') - are played out here as in countless other novels, but with I think a rare sharpness of observation and deftness of portrayal ('Suze likes drinking in a pub called the Marionette ("drinking in" not "going to")')

Behind all this there are Tash's memories of home, of her mother, her boyfriend. Behind it are her doubts about her place in England, her place in the world, above all, about her place in her father's orbit. Having 'found' her he is elusive. Aunt Sonya seems to have been given the job of looking after Tash. Possibly her father wants to marry her off to the son of a business associate (there's a strange episode where she's helicoptered out to a party in a remote castle, but like many scenes in this book Thomas gives only glimpses of this, returning to it, though, several times to draw out different aspects). The run-down, dangerous feeling school doesn't feel like a good place to be trying to resolve these issues, without support or guidance - but maybe the slightly fantastical, out of this world bubble universe, the intense relationship and teenage concerns are a good balance for those family concerns?

Oligarchy is a fascinating, provoking, book, a deeply human book and I think shows Thomas on top form. I strongly recommend it.

I always enjoy Scarlett Thomas’s books, and this is no exception. Short and punchy, Oligarchy is set in an elite hoardings school where the beautiful daughters of wealthy families compete to be thinner, more beautiful, more stylish than everyone else. The main character Natasha comes to the school from Russia, and soon finds herself deep in a world of glamourised eating disorders and deeply confusing teenage girl logic. But when one of the girls goes missing, Natasha starts to uncover some unsettling secrets at the school. The writing is darkly humorous and quickly paced, and the characters are appealing and entertaining.

This book review is the new one by Scarlett Thomas: “Oligarchy”. I have read some of her books previously – “The End of Mr Y” and “Popco”, although so long ago now that I struggle to remember the plot. I do remember the beautiful editions though, with the coloured edges on the pages. I am a sucker for those.

The protagonist is Natasha, a recent arrival to a mysterious English boarding school for girls, populated by the daughters of rich Europeans and Russians. In amongst the standard teen girl stuff of friends/frenemies and the hardships of having to smuggle in contraband items from outside, there was a plot thread on the historical founder of the house, apparently drowned in dodgy circumstances.

I did find this a challenging novel to finish – whether it was due to travelling a lot inbetween reading this and not being able to concentrate on it, or something else – I found it hard to picture the scenes, to form a bond with the girls in the story and to follow the narrative milestones.

There were scenes I did enjoy – Tash meeting her Aunt was interesting, but I couldn’t connect this to the rest of the story or the journey that Tash was going on. Ultimately, I don’t think I could ascertain if Tash and the teen girls were the ones we should be rooting for, or actually, the ‘bad guys’, spoiled and vapid.

While checking some facts I did come across this recent interview (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/oct/25/more-100-different-food-rules-healthy-eating-became-obsession) in the Guardian with Scarlett Thomas, which I thought was pretty interesting. It talks about her relationship with food and the decades long battle she’s had with it, mainly under the guise of ‘clean eating’ and being healthy. This is a bit of a motif in the book, as the young women are lauded for being thin even in the throes of a norovirus-esque sickness.

For fans of Thomas, I’d recommend this. It wasn’t badly written at all, I just couldn’t see the shape of the story and that made it less engaging than I had hoped.

As always, thanks to Netgalley, and to Canongate publishing house for granting me access.

I was really looking forward to reading this new novel from Scarlett Thomas, who is one of my favourite authors. I wasn't disappointed. It's a darkly comic take on contemporary obsessions with appearance and self-promotion, and the control of young women, in the setting of an English boarding school. The characters are well-observed and the writing is razor-sharp, funny and disturbing at the same time. There is more to enjoy in the first three paragraphs than in many books I've read.
Like other novels by Thomas it has interesting things to say but never feels didactic, her style is original and light even when dealing with weighty subjects. And it's very funny.

I was keen to read this book as I knew it was going to address eating disorders as part of its storyline. I had not realised quite how much it would dominate as a theme. Somehow, the book failed to excite me and the characters did not resonate nor the school environment. It is however very well written, just not for me

This was interesting but didn't quite work for me. I wish we got to witness more of the scenes where things happened not just have them recounted to us. Good on the way groups can get caught up in behaviours but I wanted something slightly more solid to grasp throughout in terms of detail and a sense of events being linked to one another.

Oligarchy was not at all what I'd expected from Scarlett Thomas - although she is an author who writes about varied and different topics, a meditation on life in a high-society girl's school was not something I envisioned her next book being. However, as with everything else she's written about, she writes about it masterfully. This novel draws you in to the strange lives of its characters, the inanities, anxieties, issues, or being a teenage girl at boarding school. The characters are interesting, believable, and there's a wistful tone about the book; it's, unusually, written in the present tense which gives it a transience, an evanescence, reflective of the time spent as a teenager, at school. It's an odd but wonderful little novel, that deals with subjects such as suicide and anorexia whilst managing to stay light and humourous, but still gentle and sympathetic. Scarlett Thomas cleverly evokes how it feels to be a fifteen-year-old girl, one abandoned to private education by rich parents, and, moreover, what it feels like to be a gang of fifteen-year-old girls, the dialogue, the fashions, the insults, the attitude. It's very clever, it's very fashionable, very NOW - the slang being adept and appropriate, the girls' discussions being pitch perfect. I love Scarlett Thomas's way of writing; it's so authentic, and she peppers her prose with questions, direct questions, talking to her reader and making the book a conversation. She's not assured, as a writer, she deliberates and offers possibilities, not facts; it's unusual as most writers just tell you how it is - and that's fine too, but there's something warm and sweet about this different and unusual style. It also worked beautifully in this book given that her characters are teenagers - full of doubt, full of questions themselves. For me, she's a contemporary of Douglas Coupland - I'm still wondering where he has disappeared to this past decade - but she's English and all the better for that. Her settings are dark and moorlike; Totnes, Devon, very English, very windswept, very visual. I loved this, and the ending was just entirely perfect. My only negative is that I could have read a book two or three times as long and still loved every minute - although it was perfect as it was, I want more from Scarlett Thomas and now!

Firstly, do not read this book if you have any kind of issues around eating. It's set in a boarding school where the girls are perpetually in a competition to be the thinnest and all suffer from disordered eating. The terms in which the "fat" girls are described actually made me feel a bit sick, as the sense of loathing about not having a thigh gap was pervasive.

Natasha/Tash is Russian, her mysterious father has reappeared in her life and sent her to an English boarding school. It's not a particularly good school, as evidenced by the bizarre ways in which they choose to counter an epidemic of eating disorders (although the parental feedback references on that are some of the more pleasing passages). Tash and her new friends navigate diets, teachers, rare forays into town and are actually a fairly likeable bunch with understandable motivations and seem realistic. Tash's aunt Sonya, a blockchain expert and IT con artist, is also a great character.

It's definitely an adult book, not YA, unless you want to send YA readers into a spin of self-loathing for not having the perfect figure. I genuinely struggled to finish this because of the manner in which Thomas describes the girls and women who aren't thin, and was actually a bit disappointed in the book overall. I loved her earlier books, but this is not one which I'd be recommending to anyone else, despite bits of it being clever and with dark humour.

This is a darkly different novel, it's tone contrasting strangely with the dry humour throughout. To begin with it would be easy to consider this a young adult, but I think that would be a mistake. Set at a girl's boarding school, Oligarchy delves deeply into the disordered minds of teenage girls and just how easily the human mind can be manipulated. The focus is very much on eating disorders as this group of rich, isolated girls compete with each other to be the thinnest, the smallest, the best. The wry, almost satirical humour could make it seem that Thomas is making light of a very series topic, but actually I felt it had the opposite effect.

From an adult perspective, the behaviour of these youngsters is disturbing, even frightening. From that pack mentality of the teenagers, it is normal and something to be aspired to. The eating itself isn't the only thing that is disordered, it is the very thought processes themselves and so the teenagers themselves make light of the issues. And as the narrative is told through a series of small, detailed moments in day to day life, it makes sense that there is a focus on the absurdity of the girl's desires and obsessions. The ridiculous diets, the all consuming power of social media, the 'thinspiration'and pro Ana sites; it's all here, and there are some potentially triggering aspects for anyone struggling with eating disorders and well as some almost 'how to' guide moments.

Twined throughout this is the mystery of Bianca's death and the impact this has on the girls. The ineptness of the adults to do anything about the clear problem the school has with eating disorders is a sharp counterpart to the death of a student. Tash, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, has an odd suspicion that something darker yet is lurking under the surface, but like the rest of her classmates she is all too obsessed with her weight and how she compares to everyone around you. She's a strange protagonist; self absorbed yet innocently naive.

I found this powerful, dark and yet also entertaining. It's a clever and cutting look at body image, misperceptions and control.

Scarlett Thomas is an interesting, quirky writer whose subjects range far and wide, but in her latest book, set in a bizarre girl'd boarding school near London, she outdoes herself. Oligarchy is ostensibly about anorexia, but it also offers a glimpse of the lives of wealthy, privileged ,vulnerable young women whose desire to fit in have tragic consequences..

I loved the start of this one. It's funny, dark and twisted; exactly the kind of book I love. But it kind of drifted a bit and I began to feel like not much was happening. I did love the characters and the dialogue (and inner dialogue) is so sharp and cutting. It came together at the end but the middle needed something a bit more exciting eg more subplot.

Natasha's world has changed vastly and suddenly.  She has just met her fsther, a Russian oligarch, and been sent to an all girl boarding school in England.  The girls have very limited internet access, but what they get is spent on Instagram, promoting fierce body image concerns, fad diets and eventually eating disorders.  Then one of Tash's friends dies, and the world at the school becomes even stranger.

Content warning: eating disorders, body image issues

I've read a few of Scarlett Thomas' books before and generally enjoy them.  She has an interesting way of writing and gives a unique take on the topic she is covering.  The same can be said for this novel.  The main topic of the book is eating disorders, and how easily young girls can be lead or influenced into such harmful behaviours.  I liked how Thomas looked at this topic, and how she highlighted how much influence things like social media, and also social circles, can have on young women and their body images.  Whilst I understand that eating disorders are very serious illnesses, I'm also aware that in certain environments young women do compete over things such as image and weight.  I've seen a few reviews suggesting that Thomas neglects or trivialises a serious issue, but I didn't get that impression.  I thought she showed us some of the contributing factors well, with her trademark style of wry humour and almost satirical take on real life.

Although I enjoyed the topic and the way Thomas looked at it, I found the book a bit hard to get into.  I think that was because of how it was written more than anything.  The story starts with us being thrown in to Tash's new life, without much of a background being given.  It's as if we know all of the characters well already and are continuing on from a previous novel, and I found that hard to settle into.  I also found that the story jumps from section to section, rather than flowing continually.  It's hard to explain, but it just felt a bit jerky and not quite right, almost like the sections had been written separately and then just put into order, or written in note form and not fully fleshed out.

I've given a 3* rating.  I enjoyed the ideas explored and I do like the way Scarlett Thomas writes, she is unique and refreshing.  This one just felt a bit off centre for me and I didn't quite get into it properly.

Thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for an arc in exchange for an honest review

Rollicking girls’-school adventure for grown-ups.

Natasha (Tash) is plucked from Russian poverty by her absent but filthy rich father and lands in a lesser all-girls’ boarding school in Hertfordshire. She gets in with the bad apples and high jinx ensues. Along the way, Tash learns life lessons from her bad-ass aunt, a teacher goes missing and a dead body is found in the lake.

From a barnstorming first line, Oligarchy hustles along with brio. The girls’ obsessions with weight, celebrity, sex and bodily functions, are amplified in the insular hothouse of a boarding school.

In this, her tenth, adult novel, Thomas comments on the control, use and misdirection of information. She has mastered the voice of adolescent girls and interrupts inner dialogue at the prime suggestive moment. In Aunt Sonja, she has created the archetype for the wayward relative who parents frown upon and children can’t help but love. Every family should have an Aunt Sonja.

Wonderful, playful language and irreverent humour. Flippant but never trivial. Relevant and current but not preachy.

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher, Canongate Books, for the ARC.

Mallory Towers for our late capitalist age. It's bleak, full of disconnection and isolation. Characters are distanced from their families, refuse to speak the same language as others, sneer at other social classes. Everyone in the book seems to have an emptiness at their core, a void that they try to fill with social media and consumerist aspiration, neither of which work. If Thomas' earlier work, like PopCo, was a sally against corporate rule of our lives and a hurrah for sticking it to the Man, this one seems to be an admission of defeat, a surrender of power and slipping down into helpless acquiescence. It's a depressing book but a strangely readable one (and as a parent of a twelve year old girl, it's frankly terrifying).

I'm so sorry but I just didn't enjoy this. I loved all her children's books and laughed often while reading them. They were witty, clever and funny. This, in contrast, was very bleak but I guess that may have been the point. I liked none of the characters or events at any point - everyone was unrelentingly awful and their lives deafeningly depressing.

It's a familiar world but a squinted view at it. I didn't get any humour in this one (there may have been some but I definitely missed it) and there is humour in that world - most of the time life there is hilarious and that's the partly the appeal. Maybe it was just too deadpan for me to pick it up.

The whole thing felt like an endless weight loss campaign. It became wearying a bit like Pullmans' anti-church rhetoric can be wearying. I wanted to read her other books but I don't now. I can't cope with more of that level of depression.

I'm not even sure exactly what happened at the end even though I knew it was coming and what it was roughly going to be from about 25% in and I don't have the energy to put into re-reading it to find out.